Tuesday’s attacks by alleged radical Islamists on key U.S. diplomatic
posts in Libya and Egypt propelled foreign policy, however briefly, to
the center of the presidential race that has been dominated to date by
the state of the economy.

Pointing to the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three
other U.S. officials in the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi,
President Barack Obama pledged that “justice will be done” against the
attackers, while his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney assailed the
administration for the second day in a row for allegedly “apolog[izing]
for our values.”

He was referring to a statement issued Tuesday by the U.S. embassy in
Cairo when it was under siege by several hundred protesters that
denounced a privately produced video-tape that mocked the Prophet
Muhammad and that apparently triggered the demonstrations in the
Egyptian capital.

The video-tape, whose production was claimed by an obscure
Israeli-American real estate investor whose actual identity became a
source of much speculation here Wednesday, was promoted by Terry Jones, a
Florida pastor whose past threats to burn Qurans had provoked riots in
Afghanistan and other Islamic countries in 2010 and 2011, and by a
prominent anti-Muslim U.S. Copt, Morris Sadek.

“America will not tolerate attacks against our citizens and against
our embassies,” Romney said Wednesday during a press conference in
Florida. “We’ll defend, also, our constitutional rights of speech and
assembly and religion.

“Apology for America’s values is never the right course,” he
stressed, adding that U.S. “leadership” was needed “to ensure that the
Arab Spring does not become an Arab Winter.”

For his part, Obama himself repeated that his administration
“reject[ed] all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others”
but, speaking of the attack on the Benghazi consulate, emphasized “there
is absolutely no justification [for] this type of senseless violence.
None.”

He also stressed that Washington would remain engaged in Libya whose
security forces, he said, had tried to repel the fatal attack by an
alleged Al-Qaeda-affiliated group, Ansar Al-Sharia, and helped some of
the diplomats to safety. “[T]his attack will not break the bonds between
the United States and Libya,” he declared.

The embassy assaults took place on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11
attacks and also came amidst growing tensions between Obama and Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the latter’s increasingly hostile
demands that Washington issue an ultimatum to Iran over its nuclear
program. They confirm that, to the extent foreign policy will play any
role in the Nov. 6 election, the events in the Middle East are likely to
be the focal point.

Romney and the Republicans have long charged that Obama has shown
insufficient leadership in the region, both with respect to influencing
the outcome of the “Arab Spring” — which they have mocked as “leading
from behind” — and to failing to adequately support Israel in its
confrontation with Iran, or, in the campaign shorthand, “throwing Israel
under the bus.”

At the same time, however, polls have shown consistently that a
majority of the electorate has more confidence in Obama as the steward
of U.S. foreign policy and national security than in Romney.

More comprehensive surveys, such as one issued earlier this week
by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, also suggest that Obama’s
more cautious and less militaristic approach to the Middle East
specifically and overseas developments more generally enjoys broad
public support, as opposed to the more interventionist policies
advocated by neoconservatives and other hawks who dominate Romney’s
foreign-policy team.

Until now, and particularly since his gaffe-ridden trip to Britain,
Israel, and Poland in July, Romney has shown some reluctance to make
foreign policy a major issue in the race, preferring instead to dwell on
the alleged shortcomings in the president’s economic record.

But that appeared to change Tuesday, when he declared that the Cairo
embassy’s denunciation of the video was “disgraceful,” and his main
foreign-policy spokesman, Richard Williamson, described the assaults as
“part of a broader scheme of the president’s failure to be an effective
leader for U.S. interests in the U.S.”

At the time, no one knew about the fate of Stevens, a career
foreign-service officer who had served as Washington’s chief contact to
the U.S.-backed insurgency that ousted long-time dictator Moammar
Gadhafi last year, and his colleagues.

After it became known, both Democrats and some Republicans blasted
Romney’s statement as a blatant attempt to inject politics into a
national tragedy, but the candidate doubled down on the issue Wednesday,
winning praise from Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, an influential leader of the neoconservative faction of the party.

“Romney is right to bring home the weakness of the Obama
administration,” he wrote, adding that he should use this as the moment
to focus his campaign more on foreign-policy issues.

But some independent analysts said they thought Romney had
miscalculated. “I think it will backfire,” said Stephen Clemons, an
influential analyst at The Atlantic magazine, “both because it
will be seen as using an assassination of an ambassador for political
purposes and because this incident will remind many people that there
are real costs to the kind of interventionism that Romney and the neocon
crowd are promoting.”

Indeed, the reaction by some congressional Republicans to the attacks
was precisely to reduce U.S. engagement in both Egypt and Libya.
Several were quoted in the press as calling for sharp reductions in
economic and military aid to both countries.

And at least one right-wing commentator, National Review’s
Victor Davis Hanson, who is normally aligned with neoconservatives, said
the incidents should make Washington more cautious about any
intervention in Syria or supporting popular forces in the region.

Indeed, a number of Middle East experts worried that Washington could
overreact. “It would be a tragic mistake to allow the images from Cairo
and Benghazi to undermine American support for the changes in the Arab
world,” wrote Marc Lynch, a regional specialist at George Washington
University, on his blog on ForeignPolicy.com.

“The aspirations for democratic change of many millions of Arab
citizens must not be delegitimated by the violent acts of a small group
of radicals.”

Isobel Coleman of the Council on Foreign Relations also stressed that
the two incidents should be seen as quite separate. The siege in Cairo,
she said, capped several days of denunciations of the media by
religious leaders and some media organizations of the video, while the
Benghazi attackers were heavily armed and completely overwhelmed the
local security forces.

The administration, she said, had already sent surveillance drones
over Benghazi to seek out possible Ansar camps, and she expected U.S.
officials to work closely with the government in Tripoli to apprehend or
confront the perpetrators.

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